Listly takes listmaking from the fridge door to a strategy for branding

Who doesn’t love making lists? From shopping lists, to reading lists, to lists of restaurants we want to recommend – putting down things in the bulleted or numbered format helps us organize our thoughts and streamline the information we have. Listly takes advantage of this essential part of our nature. Positioned uniquely at the juncture of crowdsourcing, content curation, collecting and bookmarking, syndication, content marketing and SEO, Listly is a platform to share numbered lists such as “10 Ways to…”, “5 Tips for…”, “12 Things not to” and other related formats. Bloggers and publishers love to market their content through community and social engagement, but it is hard to cultivate. Everyone wants their brand to grow: through creating user engagement and emotional participation leading to shared emotional ownership of the content. This is Listly’s job.

From boardgames to apps

Listly takes the numbered list formats of Web 1.0 and and makes them interactive, embeddable and shareable, and thus vastly different from their static counterparts. The idea behind it is beguilingly simple, as is the execution. Its uses are varied – an essential factor in an age where people prefer multitasking tools to maximise productivity.

The Valley based startup was founded in June 2011 by Shyam Subramanyan. Listly co-founder, Nick Kellet, a board game fanatic, had previously crowdsourced a hugely popular and award winning board game called GiftTrap, as a result of which he was intimately acquainted with the process. Not only that, but his previous startup, AnswerSets/ Set Analyzer was a business intelligence space, concentrating on lists or “sets”. As a result, the idea for Listly instantly struck a chord with him as he saw its appeal in both B2B and B2C marketing.

The “Reddit for blogs” and “YouTube for lists”

Subramanyan and Kellet see Listly as a strategic tool for marketing executives. Their mission is to displace and disrupt traditional HTML lists. Signing up is simple and as soon as you do so, you are encouraged to add three things to a list with a bookmarklet and an import feature. Once your list is made, you can share it on social networks and embed it on your blog. The content is alive as people can keep voting on it, making the lists iterating. This is one of the reasons they are calling it “the Reddit for blogs”. High quality content gets upvoted and ranked high, which means you show up on more search results. Ultimately, communities build around the most popular lists. A great way to increase user engagement and promote community growth, Listly is a destination site, a crowdsourced and crowdranked platform that is an invaluable tool for anyone wishing to build their brand.